In the grand scheme of things I don’t do ‘angry’ that much at all, but the two times when I am most likely to angry at all are commuting to work and then back again. Commuting to, because I will be fuming over the latest environment-destroying, genocidal nazi shit that has hit the news overnight and on the way back because I will be grumbling over whatever nonsense and stupidity has arrived on my desk during that day.

In both cases, I make a positive attempt to get it out of my system by the time I arrive at the end of the travel. I recall a study that concluded that a 16mins commute was optimal for that - which mine was exactly at the time.

I’d always suggest volunteering - be it wildlife conservation or staffing a charity shop or restoring vintage trains in a museum or whatever. Pick something that you have a little interest in and you will already have that in common with the other volunteers and, as a volunteer, you have no commitments and can walk away at any point.

I’m the older end of Gen X, and have never smoked. The major factor in starting is peer pressure and I didn’t have any peers around me at the critical time who did. My family didn’t either.

I seldom drink alcohol and then I have only ever enjoyed cider - not beer, wine or spirits. This is just a matter of the taste for me. I simply don’t like it.

As a kid, I had had grape juice and I had heard adults enthusing about wine as usual and I had a idea what it must taste like.

If you imagine a taste/mouthfeel spectrum with wine at one end and grape juice in the middle, what I imagined wine to taste like was pretty much at the opposite end of that spectrum to what it actually tastes like. I had one mouthful and had no desire for any more at all. I have obviously tried wine and the rest at various times since, but my opinion is basically the same.

With cider, I’ll seldom have more that a pint or two a month these days.

I don’t think that I had anything like this from cartoons, but I had read about ginger beer in various childhood books long before I actually encountered it in the flesh and also Turkish delight from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which was also one that I didn’t encounter IRL until later.

Ginger beer turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - not a patch on elderflower pressé, for example - but Turkish delight lived up to that passage, and I have thought about the book pretty much every time I have tasted it over the decades since.

I am always a little surprised that people are so keen to ‘read’ the plays. People don’t seem to have a similar desire to read film scripts.

To me, the obvious thing to do would be to watch a performance. There are plenty available online and, depending on where you live, stage performances are not too hard to find.

Reading it without seeing a performance lacks about 90% of the impact, I’d say. Reading it AFTER you see a perfomance is another matter: then you can pull out the language and take a deeper dive, but see a performance first.

I was halfway through this and increasingly puzzled before I realised that you are NOT talking about the 1945 Hitchcock film.

I am not familiar with either culture, but I’d guess that he does.

and asked me out on a date again

Was this specifically described as a date? If so, I’d suggest that this is the way in to politely raise this. In fact even if it was ambiguous, it still is the way to do it: “Just so that we are both clear, although I enjoyed meeting you the other night, I don’t want to take things any further than these casual meetings.” or similar. I’m assuming that you did enjoy it - or you wouldn’t be considering another one.

You could restate that you will soon be moving (people can be incredibly selective about what they take in and what they don’t) if you want to - although you shouldn’t need to give a reason if you don’t want to.

I always heard it as trombeleese, which I imagined to be some exotic musical instrument like this:

Brush from an electric motor. Looks to be a new-ish one.

There were 30 sheep involved in the original transaction.

The troll has 25.

His sons have 2.

The shepherds have the 3 that were returned.

To look at it the other way, the shepherd paid a net amount of 27 sheep. The troll has 25, his sons have the other 2.

You don’t add the 27 and the 2 - the 27 is the total of the 25 and the 2.

You can’t lose what you weren’t following in the first place.

This presupposes that I am paying any attention to them, rather than trying to block, skip or otherwise avoid them - which is what I am usually doing.

Yes, I’m sure that I will be posting if we do. Even if we don’t, Saturday night is still movie night for us anyway, so we’ll be watching something at home.

Going into town on Sat: a few errands and meeting some friends for a pub lunch. Maybe going to see Poor Things at a local cinema with my SO in the evening.

On Sunday yet another attempt to get some paintings up on the wall. It has been months and we still haven’t for one reason or another. I’m going settle in for some reading otherwise.

Disruption is a term that is in vogue at the moment and so appeals to headline writers. The same question could be asked In most of the situations in which it is used today, IMHO.

I would very much expect that if it had been an ‘in’ term at the time, it would have been applied to the movement by contemporary copywriters.

However, in bringing the unconscious to the fore in one form or another, I would say that surrealism was at the very least part of a wider movement that did very much disrupt and transform the arts permanently, though it was probably Freud and Jung who were the key disruptors in that regard.

We used to have a coal fire when I was growing up, so routinely in the winters.

This was a criticism that the Nazis used against liberal democracies. They saw this as a fatal weakness and used it as a justification for keeping in power themselves, once they had achieved it.

Various dictators have said much the same as well.

However, looking at the track record of democracies vs dictatorships or single party states, I think that the data will show that pluralist democracies typically last longer.

Art in general doesn’t have to disrupt anything. It can be as conventional and anodyne as you like, but surrealist art - as per the Surrealist Manifesto - was specifically intended to depart from the usual concerns of art - at least at the time:

Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

My emphasis. Conventionally, art does give some consideration to aesthetics.

So this is hovering around the -2 votes so far. And I imagine that the downvotes are from people who didn’t watch and were taken in by the title.

If the same thing had been in a four-panel cartoon or a screenshot of text or whatever, it would be raking the upvotes in.

For me, at least, it correlates to the direction that provides the widest/least obstructed/most visibly clear/least disruptive/least hazardous direction to give onward travel. Clearly the direction that that boils down to varies according to the individual situation.

I don’t recall being alone with a single central obstruction in the middle of an otherwise deserted and symmetrical street with no other influencing factors enough times to have noted any innate bias on my part.